leader of the notoriously violent Mississippi White Knights division of the Ku Klux Klan. After the 1964 murders of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael H. Schwerner, and James Earl Chaney, he spent six years in federal prison. In 1998, he was sentenced to life in prison for the 1966 firebombing murder of Vernon F. Dahmer Sr., a shopkeeper who had enabled fellow blacks to register to vote.